George Mills (14 page)

And so if Cassadaga looked homey—and it did—they looked, save for the single clue of the single suitcase, already at home.

“Look here,” his father said. He was standing by an immense glass-enclosed hoarding at the entrance to the square. “It’s the church directory. Just look at them all. Did you ever see so many? Maybe it ain’t even Florida. Maybe we hitchhiked all the way to Rome.”

“I don’t
see
any churches,” his mother told his father. “Seems in a town as tiny and churchy as this one you’d be able to spot at least one spire. Wouldn’t you think so, George?”

“Maybe there’s an ordinance against them. Maybe they only run the crosses up on Sundays, like flags on the Fourth of July.”

“Oh, George,” his mother said.

“Well,” his father said, “we didn’t come all this way to sightsee. And tomorrow we got to look for work. I think our best bet is to find somewhere we can get a place to sleep. You tired, George?”

“Yes, sir,” George said.

They walked through the little town. Mills remembered it yet. It was a paradigm of neighborhood, not a town but a constituency, not a place but a vicinity, homogeneous as graveyard or forest or a field of wheat. There were no stores or gas stations, no public buildings, neither school nor library nor jailhouse——whatever of municipality or commonwealth, canton, arrondissement, deme or nome, whatever of government itself centripetalized in the bench in the small square. There were no churches.

“I think it must be one of those suburbs,” his father said.

“What of?” said his mother.

“I don’t know,” his father said. “Maybe the highway.”

They passed several blocks of neat frame houses, not identical but all lawned, porched and porch-swing’d. Many had gardens, some narrow driveways that led to tiny garages that looked like scaled-down versions of the houses themselves.

They walked up a side street, turned south at the corner, went down that street and entered another side street. They turned at another corner. It was the same everywhere they walked. (He was carrying the suitcase now. It was that light.)

They came out of the town and were in open country.

“I think those houses must be the main crop around here.”

“Oh, George,” his mother said.

“Look there,” his father said. He pointed to the open country. “They must already have harvested that part.”

“Oh, George,” his mother said. “You tired, honey?” she asked Mills.

“A little I guess,” he said.

“Here. Give me that.” She took the suitcase from him. “We better turn back, George. The kid’s falling off his feet.”

“Suits me,” his father said, “but I didn’t see signs for lodging, no folks either, if it comes to that.”

“We’ll just knock and ask if they have a room. Some of these houses must be where the ministers live.”

(George had seen the owners’ shingles nailed to their front doors like addresses or planted in their yards like For Sale signs, the saw-toothed, varnished boards suggestive of resorts, fishing lodges, summer camps, things Indian, rustic, though the names on them were almost defiantly white.)

“That’s what I was thinking,” his father said. “Give me the case. We’ll just go back into town and ask if we can be put up for the night in some spare room of the parsonage. I don’t expect they’d charge travelers and strangers too much if they at least looked like Christians.”

“I don’t remember how to say grace,” his mother said.

“You can remember how to say amen,” his father said. “Just fold your hands and try to look like you don’t deserve what they feed you.”

His father was not a bitter man. Like all the George Millses before him, he had known subsistence but rarely hardship, treading subsistence like deep water but never really frightened, comfortable enough in his own dubious element as steeplejacks or foretopmen in theirs. So the Depression was no real setback for him. Indeed, it had presented possibilities to him, an opening of options. He had all the skills of the unskilled, chopping, digging, fetching, a hewer and drawer of a man, not strong so much as knowledgeable about weight, knowing weight’s hidden handholds the way a diamond cutter might know the directions and cleavage points of a gem merely by glancing at it. So it would not have been correct to say that the Depression had changed their lives or even that they had come south to seek their fortune. It would never have occurred to Mills that fortune could actually be sought. Fortune, if it had been his birthright ever to have more than he could use, would have sought him, it, She, Fortune, in his father’s view, being a sort of custom tailor of the goddesses, like talent perhaps, who did all the really hard work. “I promise you we’ll never starve,” his father had told him once, “we’ll never even go hungry. We won’t freeze for want of shelter or die for lack of medicine. We’re only low. We ain’t down.” So if they came to Florida to find employment it was because his father understood that there were chores in Florida too, that the menial was pretty much evenly distributed throughout the world, that Florida had its weight as well as Milwaukee—he’d shoveled coal there, been a janitor, collected garbage—its tasks and chores, odd jobs, stints, and shifts. “Our kind,” he assured his son, “could find nigger work in Paradise. What, you think it isn’t dirty here just because the sun is shining?”

So it was only a change of scene he’d wanted. And hadn’t gotten yet. “Maybe we aren’t close enough yet, maybe we’re still too high up the slope of the world. Maybe we have to be where all you have to do is just nudge a stone with your shoe and it rolls all the way downhill to the equator. But whatever, I don’t see no parrots in this neighborhood. I ain’t spotted any alligators.” (Because they’d been in Florida better than a day now, crossing from Dothan, Alabama, into Marianna, Florida, passing Tallahassee and Gainesville and Ocala and De Land, all of which could have been Northern towns except for the souvenirs in the gas stations and grocery stores—the toy ’gators and candies in the shape of oranges and grapefruits, the rubber tomahawks and Seminole jewelry, drinking glasses with scenes of St. Petersburg, Miami, Florida’s keys, fishing tackle with deep-sea, heavy-duty line—where they bought his father’s cigarettes and his mother the makings, the dry cereals and packaged breads and luncheon meats and quarts of milk, for their meals. There were suntan lotions on the drugstore shelves, cheap sunglasses on pasteboard cards. This is where his mother had bought their three new swimsuits. “It stands to reason,” she’d said before they’d ever left Wisconsin, “bathing trunks have to be cheaper down there.” And picked out the swimsuits in the first town they came to after they crossed the state line. “Sure,” his father had said, still good-humored, “maybe we should never have got George that cloth alligator when we were still up North. I think we made a mistake there. That stands to reason too. A cloth souvenir toy doll lizard should cost a lot less money in some grocery store near the swamps where there ain’t no call for pretend alligators because there’s the real thing snapping at your toes no further off than the distance of your own height.”) But still good mooded, the absence of physical evidence that they were there still within the acceptable limits of credulity. It was only late summer. They would have to wait months yet before they would get the benefit of the hot winter weather, before they would have any reason to wonder where the snow was, where the ice. His father’s mild complaint about the whereabouts of the strange birds and animals only the teasing echo of his own kid questions and alerted suspicions. He was obviously enjoying himself, the twelve-hundred-mile journey they had already come itself a vacation. He was having a good time, his temper was sweet, he was feeling fine, even the queer, beachless, ungoverned and, for all they knew, spare-roomless town a pleasant curiosity. His father, all of them, were happy.

Then they saw the chain gang.

It was policing the small square where the bench and palm tree were.

Two guards with rifles slouched along on either side of the line of convicts as they moved across the square picking up cigarette butts, Coca-Cola bottles, the feeble litter of the lightly trafficked park. A third guard sat on the bench watching the prisoners as one might casually watch a ball game played by children, his arms embracing the back of the bench, his rifle balanced against his crotch.

The convicts were actually chained at the legs, the chains drawn so close the men were almost shoulder to shoulder like men on parade. They took small steps like Chinese house servants or young girls in heels. With their backs to them, the thick white and black horizontals of their uniforms seemed a single broad fabric like a wide flag flapping. They looked like staves on sheet music.

George and his mother followed his father to the guard on the bench.

“How do you do?” his father said.

“Are there real bullets in that?” George Mills asked.

“They’re shells, son. Bullets is in handguns.”

“My boy never saw a chain gang,” his father said. “We’re from up North.”

“Up North they lock folks up,” the guard said. “Here they get to go outdoors.”

“What did these men do?” his father said.

“All different things,” the guard said. “Murders and armed robberies. Rapes. Different things.”

“Murders,” his son said. “Gee, they’re not even very big.”

“Size got nothing to do with it, son. Big men can get what they want without killing people.”

“See what can happen, George?” Mills said. “See what they do to you if you grow up wild? Officer, would you mind if we had a word with these men?” His father winked at the guard.

The guard looked at George and returned his father’s wink. His mother said nothing.

“These shells is real, son,” he said, and tapped the chamber of his rifle. “They call ’em shells ’cause they’re so big. They’re bigger than bullets. You get hit with a shell you never get better. You go along with your dad. You listen to what these cons tell you.” The man stood up and blew two shrill blasts on a whistle that hung from his neck. The convicts stopped where they were and came to a sort of attention. “Gary and Henry,” he called out to the other two guards, “these folks is from up North and got a little boy with them who don’t always mind.” He accompanied Mills and his son to the rank of convicts.

“Tell the kid how old you was when you come to us, Frizzer,” the man said.

Before Frizzer could answer, George’s father did an astonishing thing. He took his hat from his head and held it in his hands in exactly the attitude of supplication George had seen hobos employ when they came to his mother’s door in Milwaukee. Status seemed instantly altered, perspective did, his father exchanging actual inches and pounds with the prisoner. There was something religious, even pious about the gesture. It startled George, it startled them all, the prisoners literally moved, forced back, their chains scraping in a sharp, brief, metallic skirl.

“It’s true what your captain says. We’re Northerners. Hard times forced us south. There’s no work up there no more. We come for the sunshine. To catch fish from the water. My boy ain’t had no nourishment in two days. His ma is pregnant. If you got some candy, the sugar in gum…If you could let them drink off the last sweetness in those soda bottles you picked up from the ground. If you could——”

“Wait a minute, hey,” the guard said who had told them about the shells.

“If you saved something from your lunch——”

“Hold on there. What——”

“My boy ain’t had nothing in his mouth these two days, my wife’s been hungry three. Flowers we eat, the crusts from peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from other folks’ picnics in the public parks.”

“Now just a golden goddamn min——”

“I guess I don’t need this fruit,” the convict Frizzer said, and produced an orange from where it had been stored in his blouse.

“Me neither,” said another con and handed over a second orange, placing it beside Frizzer’s in his father’s upturned hat.

“I ain’t hungry,” said a third man, handing his orange to the boy.

“What the
hell!
” the guard shouted.

“Thank you,” his father said. “God bless you. God bless you, men. God bless you,” his father said, still like the hobo, dispensing love’s holy wampum, and hurried his wife and son from the square. They disappeared up a street.

“But we all had sandwiches and milk two hours ago,” George said.

“Son of a bitch,” his father said. “
Son of a bitch!
” He was furious, his size restored, not magnified, compact as a middleweight, coiled, latent with force and uppercut, like the clever laborer he was who took weight’s measure, gravity’s marksman.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” his mother said.

“Working conditions!” his father roared. “The competition!” He turned and, as hard as he could, threw the two oranges he still carried back in the direction of the square. “The way they organize the labor around here! Evidently they got to arrest and chain you before they let you work in their parks or pick their oranges. Apparently you first got to kill a man, then arm-rob and rape him before they let you into their union! We might as well stay and get a good night’s rest before we start back home in the morning.”

It was getting on toward dusk. There were cars parked in the street now, two and sometimes three cars in each of the driveways, giving the town or neighborhood or whatever it was a vaguely prosperous look.

“Look at them,” his father said, pointing to the houses, which had now turned on their porch lights, “they’re blind pigs. Or cat-houses. This must be where they apprentice their farmhands. What’s that piano music?”

“Organ,” his wife said.

When he was calmer he jabbed the doorbell of the first carless, unlighted house they came to.

“Reverend?” his father said to the large, powerfully built man who opened the door for them, the hearty, glandless and even organless type George would remember all his life (though he didn’t know this yet and saw only a big old man who looked even bigger in the dark, loose flowing robe he wore like a dress, only not like a dress any woman would wear, and suddenly recalled the prisoners’ strange garb, thinking, So it isn’t the land or trees or animals or even the houses that’s weird down here, it’s the clothes; thinking, There ain’t nothing in Mama’s suitcase like anything they wear in Florida, Mama packed all wrong). “Reverend,” his father said again. “Joe sent me, Reverend. My wife figures you have a spare room, but I figure it’s more like a back room, so you can bring me and her a couple of beers and the boy a Coca-Cola.”